Housing has skyrocketed due to governments allowing essentially unrestricted purchases by foreign entities and investment groups for the use of investment properties. Not even accounting for money laundering issues, we are watching the rich gobble up all the assets and forcing individuals into situations where they have to rent
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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I’m half joking, half serious: has anyone looked at a job site lately? Who’s doing a lot of the physically demanding work? If anything, it’s immigrants who are helping solve the housing crisis. The old boy’s network, which makes the laws and controls the money, is where the problems actually come from.
I mean it shouldn't be that hard to understand. Housing prices skyrocketed when interest rates dropped during the pandemic. Add the effects of inflation, increases municipal evaluations leading to higher taxes, and you get more costs passed on to renters. This started before all the news of "HuGe SuRgE ImMiGrAnTs".
That being said there is still plenty of truth to the argument that if we do indeed want to welcome more people here, we better make sure there are affordable places to live. So the article addresses that better regulations are needed to ensure an adequate supply of affordable housing. BUT, if people already in Canada are really struggling to get affordable housing, and the number of people who need affordable housing is increasing, you can see why this might be a problem.
struggling to get affordable housing, and the number of people who need affordable housing is increasing
The human brain is bad at noticing the fact that one of those numbers is really huge and the other comparatively very small, and tends to equate the two or put them at the same order of magnitude.
It's like the distance to the moon vs mars. Given we need foreign workers to shore up the shortfall we're expecting to see, as our own population declines below what's needed to support an ageing and increasingly long-lived population, all calculations need to take into account that expected increase. At least until we tax the rich like we used to.
Given we need foreign workers to shore up the shortfall we’re expecting to see
No we don't. You're buying the capitalist dogma that says infinite growth at any cost. Canada could shrink to 8 million people, like Austria. There would be no problem with that whatsoever.
The issue is that shrinking the population over a short period of time (and I mean more than 10% a generation) means that you have a lack of young people to take care of older people. And that's ignoring all the capitalism issues that come with all this.
Not every young person is willing to spend the majority of their free time taking care of their parents. Hell, most people aren't willing to do that more than once or twice a week, yet once you get past 70, a lot people need constant care. That's the original point of elderly homes. Of course, those homes are just plain shit and closer to cruel and unusual torture than actually a form of care (especially here in Ontario). And that's not to mention that occupancy is so tight that there's a wait list on them.
Then there's the fact that if our population drops too quickly, we'll have massive holes in essential services as well. There's already a massive hole in all blue-collar work as it stands as people would rather go into the service industry than skilled labour. And while pay is an issue, this is a problem in the States as well, where pay is far better. It's to the point that they've legalized child labour in several places just to make up for the shortfall.
Population decline is an easy way to destroy society, even ignoring capitalist needs.
But it's paradoxical. You need population increase to support increasing costs, yet increasing population creates a strain on the finite resources of the planet.
I acknowledge you said this ignoring the capitalism issues, but if you didn't ignore it then it wouldn't really be an issue. We have the wealth to handle this if we had the political courage to force an equitable society.
Believe it or not, Canada was once a population much lower than 40 million people and we managed just fine. The idea that populations cannot contract is a harmful concept because it forces acceptance of the paradox that we can infinitely grow in a finite world. And this always relies on the use of technology to overcome this. So, instead of reducing the population to the point where automobiles wouldn't need to be electric, we increase the population and try and find green solutions.
I feel that it's more complex than just the interest rates... That only explains part of the demand.
Then there's the supply. New housing construction in the US bottomed out after the 2008 recession and has never returned to where it needed to be since. At least here in the PNW we have a major shortage of housing (both affordable housing, and just new home/unit construction in general) that has been more than a decade in the making and is not trivial to overcome. It would likely take a huge investment in new/affordable housing construction incentives to get us anywhere close to where we need to be.
On top of that, immigrants are not a problem, but institutional investors (both foreign and domestic) are. There are many American homes being bought by people and firms merely as investments, which means they wind up expensive and empty. I've seen this happen in Vancouver BC, Seattle and Portland, and I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if it's happening elsewhere. We really need laws and tax benefits that help put regular people in homes that they will actually live in. Homes are one of the few kinds of assets that have really appreciated in value over the last couple of years, and because of that regular people who simply want a place to live or raise a family are being priced out of the market by rent-seekers or investors would would be perfectly happy to leave a house empty.
Housing prices skyrocketed here in Ontario when people escaped the big cities, and rushed to buy houses in smaller cities and towns. This caused a huge supply problem, as there weren’t enough houses for sale to meet demand, so bidding wars erupted.
It was a period of utter lunacy and mania for both buyers and sellers. I think we reached almost 100% price increase over pre Covid.
Once everyone had bought that wanted to buy, the market slowed down and houses went for under asking or sat on the market unsold. I don’t think anyone cared about the interest rate.
It has always been a zoning issue. Japan solved its housing crisis by putting the federal government in charge of zoning.
If apple pie is American. Real estate investment is Canadian. I mean mom and pop Canadians. It's an elephant in the room. Immigrants who are wealthy enough to invest such way are merely doing as Canadians do.
It's literally the most traditional Vancouver business. When the city was incorporated and built around the region today known as Gastown, as early as 1870 everyone was encouraged to go in debt to buy two pieces of land, then next year sell the second to finish paying for the first one. BC's economy has been sustained by sky high returns on real state for more than 100 years at this point.
The US had their real estate investing moment in the 2000s.
We're behind only because we, the most educated nation on earth, are much, much, much more likely to attend a post-secondary school, and, as you recall, we went on a dorm building frenzy in the late 90s/early 2000s to accommodate the influx of millennials who make up the echo baby boom. That buffered us for a while.
But the buffer was only so good for so long. Eventually post-secondary schooling comes to an end and people set out to find a place to call their own. As such, we eventually caught up with the US in not having enough homes to handle the millennial baby boom, and as such there was more competition for homes, price went up in response, and soon it started to look like a good place to park money for mom and pop.
Are we though? From what I can find we are only about 20% more likely than Americans, and I'm reasonably sure trade schools (like a mechanics Red Seal) counts as post secondary, which the US doesn't have Journeymens programs like we do.
We've had a housing crisis for a decade or more. But yes, it's the immigrant's fault. Not the greedy developers who are only making half as many houses as they could.
I apportion the blame 5% to the Martin Liberals ending rental construction subsidies, 5% to the Trudeau and Harper governments for ignoring the writing on the wall pre-pandemic, 5% to the BC Liberals/United party for deliberately celebrating their province's housing market as a casino, 5% to the Ontario PC government for exploiting the problem to hand out goodies to donors instead of solutions, another 5% to the Federals again for their lackluster post-pandemic response, and 99% to the various Municipalities across Canada that actually caused and continue to cause this massive problem and if every planner and councilman was fired tomorrow and we shifted to Kowloon Walled City anarchy it would be a net positive for Canada.
Edit: yes I know the math doesn't add up there but it's real-estate that's a given.
Well.. well... well.. MP Daniel Blakie clearly explains the Canada housing problem. They will blame anything but their policy for the rich.
Who is blaming immigrants? Seriously, I haven't seen that take.
You could put part of the blame on immigration targets/the system though. It's not "RaCiSt" to know that if you don't have enough housing as it is, that adding more people who needs homes won't help the issue (unless they are all here to build homes?).
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I need to explain to adults how addition and subtraction works.
I see that take every week on this instance. Used to be everyday on Reddit, but still.
I mean they aren't wrong (assuming the link is working)? Immigration should be slowed down drastically not sped up to record levels so we can at the very minimum ensure these people have an actual place to live? Hell I would argue THAT is the pro-immigration take. It's not fair to these people to move there without an actual place to live. There's plenty of recent immigrants on YouTube voicing their frustration of being sold a false promise when coming here. Seriously, just look at the average rents vs incomes. I have no idea how these people are getting by at all.
I don't disagree that high immigration introduces more demand pressure, but you do need some mental gymnastics to argue that decreasing immigration is the pro-immigration take. People are generally not allowed residence in Canada if they don't some means anyway. Instead of YouTubers, do have any trustworthy statistics on number of immigrants that end up becoming homeless? I never heard of this being a problem, it sounds a bit farfetched.
They don't end up homeless, they end up packed into houses at densities that Canadian-born people are unwilling to accept. I used to do service/maintenance work as an electrician and you would walk into a 2 bedroom apartment to see 10-15 people from 3 generations living there.
They say we need to increase density but this is actually just decreasing the standard of living. The way economics works, if people are willing to live like sardines to pay the rent, soon people will be required to live like sardines to pay the rent.
I'm not anti-immigration myself and where I live (SK) actually does need more population, but the immigration rate has to be decreased as Canada's public services and housing stock are being pushed to the limits. And something needs to be done about all immigrants ending up in the big 3 cities. Back when Canada was built, they mandated that people move out to the Prairies or other underpopulated areas if they wanted to come at all. That's why we have such a volume of German, Ukrainian, Scandinavian people here in SK - they were sent here and they stayed here, and built our rural communities.
They say we need to increase density but this is actually just decreasing the standard of living.
The most enjoyable places I've ever lived and visited were by far the densest ones. To each their own, I guess. And Vancouver which is supposedly the densest city is still at 1/3 of the density of a city like Barcelona (which is an amazing place). That's why I love downtown Vancouver, because it's the densest region of the densest city.
Sorry maybe I wasn't clear, I didn't mean that increasing density decreases standard of living, I meant over-occupying spaces that aren't built for the purpose decreases standard of living. In many parts of the world a family lives in a single room, but that doesn't mean Canada has to do it too.
High density requires planned infrastructure to support it, and suddenly having houses in the suburbs with 20 people living in them is not a healthy form of density.
Ah sorry, the "this" in "this is just decreasing standard of living" was meant to refer to people cramming up, not to "increase density". Thanks for clarifying.
Well, we agree on that. Cheers to planned infrastructure instead of rooming in the suburbs.
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Visit any of the local community subs on Reddit. Lots and lots of people blaming immigrants for housing issues.
From Wikipedia:
The Breach is an online, Canadian news outlet launched on 10 March 2021 to provide reader- and viewer-supported reporting, analysis, and videos on issues such as racism, economic inequality, colonialism, and climate change. Its contributors include the Indigenous writer, lawyer, and professor Pamela Palmater, journalists El Jones and Linda McQuaig, legal scholar Azeezah Kanji, and documentary filmmaker Avi Lewis.[1]
So it's basically their thing. Like any other news media, they're just trying to attract clicks by saying people are blaming immigrants for the housing crisis. The reality is that we need immigration to keep our economy afloat. However, like you said, the immigration system is not working in our favor because it set the limits too high and everyone and their grandmother are moving to the only couple of large urban centers where every other immigrant decided to live: Toronto and Vancouver.
It's not the immigrants' fault. It's the immigration system and the government who can't manage their shit well.
If you go on Canada Reddit it’s every other comment on housing
I imagine Facebook and Twitter are the same
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Immigrants are at least partly to blame for the pressures. I mean, it's impossible they're NOT impacting the cost of housing. If you add 400,000 people to a country and do not add 400,000 units of new housing that year, you're in a deficit. It's Grade 1 math.
But what is genuinely to blame is a cogent political strategy to house Canadians. We can't just leave it to the private sector to maximize profits. We can't expect homeowners to make secondary suites. We can't do nothing.
Cutting immigration is a sure-fire way to prevent over-demand for a scarce resource. It may sound right-wing but that's the way it goes.
Cutting immigration is a sure-fire way to prevent over-demand for a scarce resource.
Sure! At the cost of no longer having skilled immigrants advancing Canadaian industry and economy. We'd also go into a population decline which, while great for housing, would cause lots of problems with job shortages and government benefits paying out way more than they collect.
Immigration is far too much of a benefit to Canada to stop it instead of just building more places to live. We are one of the largest land masses on the entire planet. I think we can fit a few more houses in.
There's no point in making houses out in the middle of nowhere. Not only does it cost a massive amount of money to build the infrastructure just to support it, but who the hell wants to live several hours away from where anything exists? No stores, no jobs, no schools less than 3 hours away? No thank you.
That said, all they have to do is change the zoning laws to convert residential into mixed use housing plus actually build high density housing. We don't need skyscrapers everywhere. That's only happening because it takes 3 years to get anything bigger than a single family home approved. Remove the approval process and we can get tons of low and mid rises that would be extremely cheap and quick to build.
At the cost of no longer having skilled immigrants advancing Canadaian industry and economy.
Meanwhile skilled Canadians are moving to the US en masse.
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